On day five of Apple’s e-book price fixing trial, HarperCollins’ CEO Brian Murray couldn’t recall very much from those heady days of early 2010, when Apple was negotiating its entry into the e-book business—but his testimony did suggest that he may have been the shrewdest negotiator of the five publisher CEOs. Under questioning from U.S. attorney Lawrence Buterman, Murray—who Apple lead negotiator Eddy Cue had once described as an "idiot" for his steadily worsening counterproposals—revealed that in fact he was using Apple to leverage Amazon and Barnes & Noble into agency deals with better terms.
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